Incorporating syntactic information into a document retrieval strategy

Abstract

This paper deals with mechanisms for performing text retrieval which incorporate a degree of linguistic processing into the overall strategy. We have performed some experiments using parsing of text an a test collection of documents and queries to try and find out exactly if and how parsing could contribute to an overall improvement in retrieval effectiveness. Investigating this topic has led us to the definition of a retrieval strategy which incorporates parsing of query text and a more “shallow” parsing of document texts, whose retrieval effectiveness is investigated and described. Our results indicate that significant improvements in retrieval effectiveness can be obtained by incorporating such linguistic processing into an overall retrieval strategy.